I would add to that with a concise tweet I recently saw someone post re: Nest's smoke detectors and their ability to differentiate what kinds of "smoke" hit the sensors - all while uploading data to the internet:

I suspect Nest wasn't worth the $3.2 billion, based on what we can do today with thermostats and smoke detectors, nor is it clear when it might be worth Google's investment. On the other hand, we have not had a chance to think through what we might do if we were able to manage a set of household appliances and systems as a holistic system. In at least some cases, the intelligence one system might have about another would be useful. Maybe baking bread and washing clothes in the middle of the night, as family sleeps, would result in both cost and energy savings. Or when we all have solar roofs, it would be good to have household work to do for the power generated.

I was at Lowe's recently and saw Honeywell's alternative to Nest. We're talking about Honeywell, maker of ubiquitous round thermostat that the Nest device is designed to mimic. The thing is, Honeywell's rectangular alternative to Nest costs about half as much, and it may improve on the smarts with programmability as well as smart sensing. If you read the reviews of Nest, you'll see that many people are frustrated by situations where Nest kind of outsmarts itself. Look at the 290+ 1-start reviews on Amazon and you'll get the idea.

Despite all the pie-in-the-Internet-of-Things Hoopla, people buy Nest to serve as a thermostat. Honeywell and others that are way down deep in the HVAC business are going to undercut it on price, beat it on distribution and quite possibly put their years of HVAC expertise to work to beat it on functionality. Smoke detectors? Same deal. Nest will be to Google what the Flip Minnow was to Cisco.

@Thomas perhaps it has greater value for people who are away from home more. I can see going away during the winter and then worrying that the heat isn't set high enough to prevent pipes from freezing or that it's set higher than need be with no one in the house.

A lot of home automation pipe dreams can be dismissed with the phrase, "More trouble than it's worth." I have a Nest. Installed it myself. It's nicer than my old thermostat but frankly its value is aesthetic. The energy reports are meaningless because I don't have air conditioning and when the heat is on, it's needed. Having data about that doesn't matter to me. And being able to turn Nest on or off remotely is not all that useful.

@Shane I was thinking the same thing. If you use Google Maps apps for your car, it already knows a lot about your driving habits. And now it can learn a lot about your home, with indicators of when you are in and when you leave. Combine that with what it knows of your search history, choice of videos, and what it knows about your email messages (if you use Gmail) and it may get to know your next move even before you do yourself!

I agree that Google has the data analytics expertise, ambition and money to take charge of the home smart device movement. But with the company's history of brazen disregard for privacy rights, I just hope they're not on a march to monopoly. I get a little uneasy about Google having even more access to even more of my personal data. Then again, I use Gmail, YouTube, Google+, Google Maps, an Android phone, and an Android tablet all day, every day. So it may be too late for me! But other players need to jump in fast because Google is giddy to be the neighborhood bully in the Internet of Things space.

Since the Jetsons cartoon, I have wanted an automated home and car. There are many positives about it. But the Jetsons never dealt with the most obvious problems we have of outsiders breaking into our private domain and doing things with our "account". Today that's a big issue, as is total Identity Theft. So what's wrong with turning off a switch ourselves, or having individual items we can reset as we leave and return. That requires better products that, for instance, heat faster in winter, cool faster in summer. Many times I have forgotten to remove meat from the freezer and then had to think about what alternatives I had for dinner that night. I survived it without problems. These are not major changes we need. Making the Internet safe to use for "things" and making better quality "things" is where we need to focus our efforts. And we also need to make better use of natural resources for production of power for all these "things" we take for granted.

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